Paxson and her Brown University myrmidons didn’t want Kelly brought to account; apparently they preferred that he be allowed to soft soap the illegal Terry stops and racial profiling that have run rampant under his regime.
No police commissioner anywhere in the country should be allowed to give a lecture on a college campus in which he or she defends wholesale law enforcement malfeasance and racial profiling as “proactive policing.”
Brown University honchos don’t realize this, but thank heavens there are students on that campus who do. According to news reports, they petitioned university officials to cancel Kelly’s speech.
Their pleas were ignored, so, in the words of student protester Jenny Li, “we decided to cancel it for them.”
Li sounds like an Asian name. If Jenny Li is indeed Asian American, she might have looked at the data about NYPD stop-and-frisk tactics and concluded that she had no dog in the fight. Blacks and Latinos were stopped and frisked the most.
Students across American campuses on May 4, 1970 might have thought they had no dog in the fight at Kent State University either, but many acted as if they did.
That was the day Ohio National Guardsmen fatally shot four students at Kent State University. Student protests erupted nationwide; some campuses had to close – prematurely – for the spring semester.
Li might be part of a new generation of college students, picking up where those in 1970 left off. They made a decision that they didn’t want to hear a word Mr. “Thumb-My-Nose-At-The-Bill-of-Rights” Kelly had to say, and they acted on it.
Those students showed more gumption and guts than city, county, state and federal legislators who’ve failed to haul Kelly – and Bloomberg – before them and ask some darned hard questions about the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk policy.
But that would be too much like legislators doing their jobs. It IS their job to investigate the wholesale violation of the civil liberties and civil rights of American citizens, isn’t it?
It’s also their job as legislators to act as a check and balance against the power of the executive and judicial branches of government. The Kelly-Bloomberg duo represent executive power run amok and at its very worst.
If legislators can’t rein in that kind of abuse of power, or even question it, then they should be run out of office as quickly as Kelly got run off of Brown University’s campus.
(Photo: AP)
NYC Police Commissioner Ray Kelly Heckled at Brown University, and Rightfully So was originally published on blackamericaweb.com
